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Folktales for a new world: Rain and Other Stories by Mia Couto @ericmbbecker @biblioasis

In the preface to his newly translated collection, Rain and Other Stories, Mozambican writer Mia Couto tells us that the stories we are about to read were written after his country’s long and bloody civil war. The conflict which erupted in 1977, two years after the African nation achieved independence from Portugal, would last for fifteen years, leaving over one million dead and devastating the…

A Gritty Book and a Great Piece of Literature | Review of “Debris” by Kevin Hardcastle (2015) Biblioasis

Kevin Hardcastle will be appearing at the 2017 Toronto Word on the Street festival

There is a beauty in the way a writer can capture a series of lives that are bitter and downtrodden. To use language that is direct and frank takes not only a certain skill but also requires a writer to a have an awareness to a segment of society that isn’t pretty or polite for most of the time. Kevin Hardcastle…

#biblioasis Biblioasis Publishing Novels, Fiction, SS, Non-fiction, Poetry biblioasis.com [email protected] [email protected] WINNER – French-American Translation Prize, 2025 Biblioasis is a Canadian independent bookstore and publishing company, based in Windsor, Ontario. Founded by Dan Wells as a bookstore in 1998, the company began publishing books in 2004 with poetry collections by…

. . . I want to record all this, I want to write down that everything is all right, the end of the world is behind us anyway, no machine guns in sight, only the signs of another oncoming flood, it’s early, and at the other end of the train tracks she’s gradually woken up by the seagulls, and the room in which she opens her eyes looks different, in her slumber she may not even comprehend  what’s…

Books for November: The Haunted Bookshelf series by Biblioasis in Ontario, Canada, with illustrations by Seth. A delight! These vintage ghost stories, not usually Christmas themed, are perfect for reading on a wintry day or even a sunny afternoon.

The boy sticks his head all the way out and his black hair whitens, the ground lies everywhere beneath a thick layer of the sorrow of angels, no grazing either in pasture or on beach, all the livestock kept inside and the farmers counting every hay-blade going into them, in some places little remaining but leavings  and the animals bleat and low for a better life, but the clouds are thick and no…

The sea on one side, steep and lofty mountains on the other; that’s our whole story in fact. The authorities, merchants, might rule our destitute days, but the mountains and the sea rule life, they are our fate, or that’s the way we think sometimes, and that’s the way you certainly would feel if you had awakened and slept for decades beneath the same mountains, if your chest had risen and fallen…